[News] Plans for 2022

Hello everyone, Corintio here!

I wish you all a happy new year, and I'm a little late because I was out of town for the past week. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about our plans and some challenges for 2022 while also recapping a little of what was done last year.

The year 2021:

That was a really busy year, and here is a little bit of what was done:

• We might have not added too many new quests, but we redid the whole town and all of our former cutscenes from scratch, you can check the video here.
• Worked with writers to organize dozens of documents related to our lore, main plot and how we aim to have Kalyskah growing as a character as the player plays the game;
• Decreased the number of bugs compared to what we had before; 
• Completely redone our UI, added more complexity to the combat system, released something around 27 new patches for the game (that's more than making two releases per month);
• Added the checkpoints system;
• Added a way for Kalyskah to rest and wait a few hours in-game;
• Added a mechanic called "World Events", that will enable us to work on more complex quests in the future;
• Added a new dungeon;
• Improved the character customization;
• Redid a lot of the hairstyles that used to be looking really bad, there's more to do in this area but we'll get there eventually;
• Improved the skin shaders and added wrinkle maps;
• Added new armours;
• Added the Stealth mechanics;
• Improved the locomotion and added a climbing system;
• Tons of new sex animations;
• And more that I'm probably forgetting to mention!

We have a lot of challenges for 2022, but looking back to what our game used to be in January of 2021, and considering that for a period of almost 6 months I had health issues (My arm was hurting a lot, and it still is when I overwork) and had to count a lot on the other members of the team, I'm happy to see how far we've come. You can download version 0.14.2 here if you want to see how much the game has changed. The biggest differences will be in the open world since we were pretty much done with the starting dungeon ever since 0.8.

Planned Features:

Now let's talk about what we plan for the year, which can be summed up in a few topics:

Story/Quests:
We plan to reduce the number of side-quests and move forward with the main plotline which will have 3 big milestones: 

• The first is to explain a little bit more about what the Seekers are
• Then we want to work on a new prologue for the game 
• And finally, move forward with the vicious seed and civil war plotline, or at least add enough foreshadowing to it. 

We might not be able to implement everything this year yet, but we will surely have all those quests written. The whole timeline of the game is already in several documents, now we need to write the quests to tell this story and bring it to Unreal Engine.

Gameplay:
The main feature we will be adding gameplaywise this year is probably the skill tree and puppeteers mechanics entwined with the story. We thought we would be able to add law and vampire hunters last year but a lot of things happened along the way and we couldn't do it (Talking about the health issues I had). So This year we'll make fewer promises related to gameplay and focus more on the story. The skill system will add complexity enough. If our budget increases in a way that we can get more people working on implementing the story inside Unreal Engine, I can start programming the crime system in parallel.

Steam:
This year we will also start working on our steam page, so people will be able to wishlist us and so on. But we don't imagine that the actual game will be done for the next two years. So the steam page will probably be released for alpha tests either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next.

Level Design:
There isn't much left to do on the level design side at least for the first chapter of the game. Mostly, we need to add content to places we already have. We will see if we can find someone to help us with adding more dungeons and places to explore but there are literally only two or three new landmarks missing (other than the prologue area) for us to tell the whole story of the first chapter. This is good because it means that we'll be able to get part of the budget that was going to this area to invest in VFX and Character design.

Character Design:
This is the holy grail of what we need for now. Yes, expanding the story is equally important but keep in mind that it wouldn't work to expand the story of the game while everyone looks like generic characters dressing in the same clothes. So this year we plan to add way many more unique characters to the game. The problem is that our last character artist started to work on a bigger company we will need to find someone else to fill the gap. 

Erotic Content:
We are expanding the animation list and adding threesomes to the game. Now if I manage to take some work out of my back, we can add some sort of artificial intelligence to the choices NPCs will make during a scene. But more on that when we actually start adding the feature since it will probably be something for the next semester.

Replayability?
We want to add procedural content to the game but we can't promise it for this year because there's already a lot on our plate, and to do this type of thing we would have to increase the number of members in the team. So this is highly dependant on our budget.

Collectables
Throughout the year, we'll be working on new art with our characters that the player will be able to find or unlock playing the game. And then see them at the gallery.

Journals
We will also add some journals for you to find and learn more about the lore and how people in Thulgatha live.

Our focus this year is to take some time to add polishment to what we already have, and then work on adding more hours of gameplay, without adding too many features in parallel that can possibly break the game and make us lose a whole month fixing it. That's a situation we faced last year and even though I don't regret adding features, I think now that we aim for a steam release, it is important to tell a bit more of the main story so people can have a better grasp of what the game is about. 

Thank you a lot for being part of this journey and I hope you all have a great year!